Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Where to start? I am fairly certain that most of you have heard about Naruto, whether you like the show or not it is pretty huge. I was first introduced to the show by a friend about 3 years ago, and I liked it from the start, and I continued to watch it (except the one year of fillers, they sucked)

Of course, like with all other popular franchises they have to milk the fans for the most amount of money, enter video games.

Now, I have only played one of the previous games, a fighting game, and it was fun, but after 10 minutes I was tired of it.

So when I heard about this game I was excited, and since I was bored out of my skull the other day I bought it.

Naruto is a 12 year old ninja student who just happens to have a giant nine tailed demon fox sealed inside his body. Rise of a Ninja covers the first 80 episodes of the show using small clips from the series. This sort of works. The main problem is that this game was an attempt to make a Naruto game for people who do not watch the anime, the problem is that the story clips only cover a small part of the main story. My flat mate watched me play the game (he doesn’t watch the show) he had no fricken idea what was going on at certain points. The game also edits some of the sequences which gives the story a slightly different outcome (if you watch Naruto you will notice, but maybe not care)

My biggest grief with the story is that it is just too short, and they have simply neglected most of the story as many of the story elements are not present (Sasukes part is minimal at best) I used about 8-9 hours to beat the game, but I had spent several hours doing side quests and sightseeing. You can probably beat the main story in about 6 hours.

But those few hours are enjoyable. You spend a lot of time in Narutos home city of Konoha, it is completely free roam, and it looks great, it feels great to. You can run around and do several side quests (usually fetching missions) there are also ninja races (race trough checkpoints), hide and seek missions (you have to find Konahamaru, a character from the show) ramen delivery quests and my favorite, curing heartbroken people with the sexy nijutsu.These side quests have to be unlocked. You do this by completing the few side quests you have available and some of the main quests, by doing so you will make the villagers happy, at certain percentages you unlock a new side quest type.(as I write this I still need 5 heartbroken villagers, there is a unlock at the end but I don’t know what it is)

The game play is interesting and captures some of the excitement from the show. You can use shadow clones to break walls, chackra concentration to walk on water and run up certain walls (they have foot prints on them) and of course sexy ninjutsu.

All of these can be used in combat as well, but you will most likely just use shadow clones.

You can upgrade all the special techniques and buy new combos. When you enter a fight, the perspective changes to that of a traditional fighting game. This works pretty good, but it looks a little weird when you’re fighting Gara and Orichimaru (how the hell do you spell his name)

But, on the down side, other then the main battles with main characters you only fight a handful of different enemies, bandit, bandit, lieutenant, bandit boss, genin ninja and jounin ninja. It gets boring beating the same guy up after a while. And despite the fun combat it is not very deep. Seems like they could have done more with it.

As far as voice acting goes, I am not sure what to say. I watch the show in Japanese, and I think I prefer it that way.

Overall Naruto is not that bad. It is fun to run around from roof to roof, but the game is just to short, does a poor job of telling the story, there isn’t that much to do really, once the story is beat there is only a few hours left of side quests.. And as mentioned the combat is shallow, I only ised two different combos.

If you like the show you will probably buy this game despite what anyone says. But I spent 500 NOK (ca 100$) on it, I don’t feel I got my money worth.

This game could have been so much more, and hopefully they improve it for the next game.